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Ten Buzzwords To Cut From Your LinkedIn Profile

In your LinkedIn profile, do you describe yourself as a creative, motivated, innovative professional with a track record of effective problem solving and extensive expertise? If so, you’re like a lot of the professional networking site’s 187 million members who overuse trite, empty words and phrases that sound good but say almost nothing.

LinkedIn culled through its member profiles and came up with a top ten list of terms that are overused by professionals in the United States.

Think about it and you realize that most of these words are generic descriptors that any employer would likely take for granted. Merriam-Webster defines “creative” as “marked by the ability or power to create.” In other words, it means you can do stuff.

Instead of falling back on empty terminology, describe your skills and achievements in concrete terms. Give specific examples. Instead of saying you have “extensive expertise,” say you worked seven years as vice president in charge of sales.

A year ago LinkedIn put together the same sort of list of overused buzzwords. It’s no surprise that eight of the ten terms are the same this year, and “creative” remains at the top of the list. Two terms that are no longer on the list: “communication skills” and “dynamic. But those were replaced by the equally trite “responsible” and “analytical.”

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There is a simple answer to this. A great deal of these people don’t HAVE a lot of experience or interesting details for their resume and therefore use double-speak and colorful (or colorless?) language to describe what otherwise sounds ridiculously ordinary.

There are probably a lot of experienced people that also use these words, but I’d bet they are the minority.

Thanks for your comment. I’m a great believer in the strength of specificity, even to describe jobs that don’t seem to be worth much. I think employers can see through buzzwords. Sad to say, I think a lot of experienced people do use buzzwords. In fact I’m embarrassed to admit that I just discovered that my own profile uses the words “extensive experience” in the summary section. I must edit it!

This is just plain silly. Chances are if one is hired by someone who is actually that arbitrary, even neurotic, over what universally means what, the job is going to be absolute hell. Talented head hunters use body language and, yes, intuitive skills — not this hooey.

I think you’re missing the point. These words end up appearing as fluff and neither stand out to the employer nor do they say very much about one’s abilities and experience.

After a while of reviewing resumes, they all start to sound the same, and you have to get the person into the interview room to really know what they’re capable of (and even then, they aren’t always great as describing it.) It’s more beneficial for both the employer and the potential employee to modify the language used.

I appreciate the intent of this article, and searched my LinkedIn profile to see if I had ‘erred’. The irony is, even though the bulk of my career has been spent doing creative, strategic and communications-based work, many of these buzzwords don’t show up on my profile, except for last year’s favorite – communication (skills). As a communications consultant, I think this would be hard for me to avoid :)

Which leads me to the larger point. It’s well and good to trawl our profiles for trite and commonly overused terms, but it also requires a keen eye to look past the data points and appreciate when these words are actually being used judiciously. Are creative & innovation professionals like me supposed to stop using those words because millions of others do? Most likely not.

To me, this is a case of data mining providing useful global patterns, but it still needs a discerning human being to identify the valid outliers and respond accordingly. Cheers!

Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I agree that it’s tough to find other words to describe something as basic as communication skills. But if you coach professionals on how to improve their public speaking, their conduct in meetings and their writing, maybe it’s better to be specific and lay out those skills. I’m afraid I do think that “creative” and “innovative” are horribly overused buzzwords. Again, if you can cite specific accomplishments, like describing something you created or some way that you innovated, that’s always best.

Everyone has these words in their profiles and resumes, decision makers, executives, hiring managers, employees – everyone. People don’t react to individual words, the human brain processes sentences. People make decisions on content, these buzzwords are commonplace but it’s your overall presentation that matters. Nobody is out there making a business decision on this word or that word. Take a look at your LI profile. Copy and paste it into Word, on the review tab click word count; guess what? You likely have thousands of words, resumes will generally have less. I have 2500 or so words in my LI profile, I don’t care to count the buzzwords but let’s say I have all 10. .3% of my profile contains buzzwords, 99.7% does not. I’m confident people will pay attention to the 99.7% and not give a rat’s behind about the .3%.